Over the holidays I spent sometime perusing the log files on my server and found several interesting problems. One of those interesting issues dealt with the traditional cron job I had setup running wp-cron.php every 15 minutes on this blog. It seems I neglected to adapt the cron job when I enabled both SSL and SNI on this website. I previously had the following running in cron every 15 minutes;

There are a few issues with this… wget was not following the redirect from HTTP to HTTPS after I forced HTTPS/SSL as the default for all traffic. And since I was using multiple virtual hosts behind a single IP address I was relying on SNI and the HTML headers to determine which virtual host the request should be delivered to.

It’s pretty funny how I actually find these posts pretty entertaining to myself… going back and looking at all the desktop upgrades I’ve gone through over the years.

In any case I thought it was high past time to give Windows 10 a spin so I went out and purchased a 512GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD. I did this so I could clone my 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD, providing me a very simple backout plan if I didn’t like Windows 10 or something went terribly wrong. I fired up Clonzilla Live via a USB flash drive and quickly cloned the 256GB SSD to the 512GB SSD. I installed the 512GB SSD and put the 256GB SSD in a safe pace. The computer booted up to Windows 7 fine on the new SSD and I upgraded to Windows 10 with no problems or issues. Fast forward almost four months later and I’m pretty happy with the upgrade. I’m not sure I gained a whole lot from a technical standpoint. Windows 7 had worked pretty well for me the past few years and I suspect Windows 10 will do the same but if the upgrade hadn’t been free I’m not sure I would have made the jump myself. About four weeks ago I upgraded my Lenovo T430 to Windows 10 without issue. It helps that I replaced the hard drive with an SSD about a year ago.

Windows 10 is a free upgrade for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users until July 29, 2016 so time is running short.

Over four years ago I had the idea of trying my hand at a podcast. I enlisted a number of IT professionals from the Network Infrastructure Forums to join me including Dominik Pickhardt, then real life intruded and the project fell idle just before we were going to launch. Since that time Dominik has launched Network Autobahn, which has been a large success due in part to his hard work and efforts. At the recent Networking Field Day 11 I had a frank discussion with Dominik about the possibility of trying to jump start the project and we collectively decided to give it a go.

We recorded our first show last week with another show scheduled for this Sunday so I’m here today to ask for your feedback. We’ve each committed to keeping the project going for six months after which time we’ll re-evaluate. We’re going to try and keep each episode to around 30 minutes in length and hopefully record bi-weekly (we’ll see how we hold that schedule when the weather gets nice).

Here’s a look at a few different articles and posts that caught me eye over the past few weeks…

Articles

Network Field Day #NFD11 by Dominik Pickhardt – Dominik will be attending Network Field Day 11 this January 2016 in San Jose, CA. It just happens that I’ve also been invited to join the gang in Silicon Valley on January 19th – 22nd. You find more information over on the Tech Field Day website.

A free, almost foolproof way to check for malware by Roger A. Grimes – A great article describing how to easily test a Windows client to see if it’s infected with some malware. I’ve recently found myself doing quite a bit of security forensics analyzing various systems and images.

Will Let’s Encrypt threaten commercial certificate authorities? by Larry Seltzer – Let’s Encrypt is a new free Certificate Authority looking to make publicly signed certificates available for free to anyone. The stated goal of the organization is to help secure the Internet by offering free SSL certificates to anyone. The certificates are only valid for 90 days, a significant caveat and differentiator with the commercial certificate authorities.